Colonies

How to spell colonies

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce colonies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does colonies mean?

1. nounTerritories or settlements that are controlled by, and usually distant from, a governing country.
2. nounGroups of organisms of the same kind living closely together, such as bacteria, ants, or seabirds.

Colonies in a sentence

• The empire governed several overseas colonies for more than two centuries.

• The technician counted the bacterial colonies growing on each plate.

• The history lecture compared the trading colonies of three rival powers.

• The cliffs are home to large colonies of nesting seabirds every spring.

Where does colonies come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin colonia, which meant a settled place or farmstead established by Romans on conquered land. That noun was built on colonus, meaning a farmer, tenant, or settler, which in turn came from the verb colere, meaning to cultivate, till, or inhabit. The same colere root sits inside familiar words such as 'cultivate' and 'agriculture', a reminder that the earliest colonists were thought of as people who worked the soil of a new place. English took the singular 'colony' in through Old French and Latin during the late 1300s, and the plural follows the ordinary English rule of changing a final -y after a consonant to -ies. The spelling trap is precisely that shift: the singular ends in -ony, but the plural drops the y and adds -ies to give colonies.

How the word is built

• colon- (from Latin colonia: a settlement or farmstead)
• -ies (plural of nouns ending in -y)